Valve has taken the proverbial wraps off the already-teased, and now revealed, Half Life: Alyx. The latest installment in the Half-Life universe, again, isn't a sequel to the narrative that has been left midway with the ending of Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Instead, it's a prequel of sorts, situated in the 20-year time gap between the original Half-Life and Half-Life 2. It's at this point in the timeline that players will accompany Alyx and her father, Elias, in their fight against the Combine.

Engine-wise, the game will make use of the Source 2 engine, and will be released with accompanying Source 2 tools for worldbuilding, allowing players to design and distribute their own worlds set in this universe. The game will be a single-player, story-driven FPS affair, and will make heavy use of Half-Life's physics interactions. The game is being announced as a full-length game release built from the ground-up for VR - it's not just a VR adventure the development team embarked on, though it did start that way. But let that be for a while: go after the break to watch the game's trailer. I dare you to say this doesn't quite look like your Half-Life dream game.
In an interview with Geoff Keighley, Valve's David Speyrer, Robin Walker and Dario Casali shared some details as to how exactly Half-Life: Alyx came to fruition (it began as an exploration VR game that naturally developed into a Half-Life game with Half-Life models), explained why they chose to develop a prequel to Half-Life 2 instead of taking on the development of a Half-Life 3 (basically, Half-Life 3 has such heavy expectations sen on it that it's just so overwhelming to tackle as a creative project, even if VR is used as a pole around where the entire experience revolves).They also explained why the game won't have a mouse and keyboard equivalent, as some VR games have shipped with. According to the developers, there are many layers of interaction that VR allows that can't accurately be translated by a mouse and keyboard (that usually happens when there is full body tracking and the player's body is actually rendered into the game, interacting with it in a fully physics-based way, I'd say). The developers talked a while about the simple interaction of opening a door, and in how many ways that can be done in the VR environment: you can push it slightly and peek; you can shove it and spray the entire room with lead; you can open it slightly and throw a grenade. All of these interactions with something as simple as doors meant that for them to be actually translated into a keyboard and mouse game, each would have to be mapped. And we're just talking about ways to interact with doors.


As the game description reads:

"Immerse yourself in deep environmental interactions, puzzle solving, world exploration, and visceral combat.

Lean to aim around a broken wall and under a Barnacle to make an impossible shot. Rummage through shelves to find a healing syringe and some shotgun shells. Manipulate tools to hack alien interfaces. Toss a bottle through a window to distract an enemy. Rip a Headcrab off your face and throw it at a Combine soldier."

Whether or not this is the first VR experience in a new era for the Half-Life universe, we'll have to see; though the developers do say that that will definitely have something to do with the game's reception. Of course, with so little relative players in the VR space, it remains to be seen by what metric the game will be considered a commercial success.